Barn Cat

Kyoko Mori

A Gemma Open Door book

A young girl leaves Tokyo with her mother in 1979, carrying her pink suitcase to a new home, a new father and sister, on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Thirty-three years later, her mother’s belongings are found packed into boxes, her furniture draped in white sheets. Without so much as a note, she has left the two sisters connected by history, by some idea of family, to look for her. What happens when people lose their way home? Like a little barn cat, they grab onto a second family. . . and start again.

Kyoko Mori’s award-winning first novel, Shizuko’s Daughter, was hailed by The New York Times as “a jewel of a book, one of those rarities that shine out only a few times in a generation.” Her many critically acclaimed books include Polite Lies, The Dream of Water,Yarn and the novels, Stone Field, True Arrow and One Bird. Kyoko Mori teaches at George Mason University and lives in Washington, D.C.

“Kyoko Mori is one of the world’s most inimitable writers.”– Howard Norman, The Bird Artist, What is Left the Daughter “Kyoko Mori writes about loss so quietly and wisely, and in a way no other memoirist I’ve read has ever managed.”– Suzanne Berne, The Ghost at the Table, A Perfect Arrangement, A Crime in the Neighbourhood (Orange Prize for Fiction), Lucile: My Grandmother in History, and Vice Versa.

“Sit with Kyoko Mori as she artfully takes in hand needles and fiber, and also the realities of her life story, to knit this gorgeous memoir of loss, emigration, grief, identity and the work of her hands.”– Suzanne Strempek Shea, Sundays in America. “Kyoko Mori’s books are like red dragonflies at sunset. Afterwards, I’m not sure if I really experienced them or if it was a dream.”– Henri Cole, Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf

Barn Cat

Kyoko Mori Short Fiction Paperback, 100 pp

Reading level: 4.7

$10.00

978-1-936846-40-5 [p]

978-1-936846-44-3 [e]

About Gemma Open Doors

An innovative program of original works by some of our most beloved modern writers, originally designed in Ireland to promote adult literacy. These fresh stories showcase new writing from both best-selling authors and emerging voices.

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